Category Archives: Color

Hello again! Two posts in one month, but don’t expect much more! 😛 I do aspire to be like Kentarou Miura, but I think I am much worse at updating.

In any case, I made another drawing tutorial. Last year was the line art and this year I colored. I actually did this in the spring, but I forgot to video edit, so I just waited until August again since it’s about that time! At least I’m good about putting one up once a year? Here is the link to the youtube video. But it’s going to get embed at the bottom too!

So after being totally won over by Shinhan, because the owners are SOOO nice to me every time I come by their booth at SDCC — and great products of course! that’s why I keep coming back too. I brought my boyfriend, Peter, to meet them and they were just gushing about me to him. It was so lovely. 🙂 I bought myself a good set of markers. I tried my best to create a limited palette, plus, I still had a ton of Copics, so it’d be a waste, I used them together to create this final piece:

I think I really like how all this came out. I’ll be honest, I really suck at using markers. I can’t control them the way other artists seem to. It’s like much more magical when they do it, but I guess practice makes perfect.

Yes, Shinhan and Copic are practically the same type, just different brands. You can intermix them together, but Shinhan is cheaper, I suppose their production costs in S.Korea is significantly less than Japan. Quality-wise, practically the same. I specifically chose lanterns as a main subject to showcase how to create gradient effects using a “0-colorless blender.” Definitely need to frequently refill every so-often. They sell 20mL refill inks that you can just fill up through the nib. But nibs should be replaced if it starts to wear out, which I am now finding after making this video.

I tried to keep the video length and size reasonable, so I decided to speed it up by 400%. Anymore of course, seemed way too fast. I wanted it to be less than 30 minutes… but (-_-) sigh, it came out to be 46 minutes.

So normally, I keep a palette next to me when working with creating blending. A white one is the most preferable, because you’ll be able to see the colors the best, but glass works too because you can just put a piece of white paper underneath.

The gradation technique works best on a clean nib, 2 colors, and 1 colorless blender. I actually but a refill 20mL for the 0 colorless blender by Shinhan also because the first time I tried out the technique, I was like this really awesome! But you need lot’s of ink to make it gradate nicely. I also use this technique to mix all new colors that I otherwise don’t have with the markers individually. That grey purple in the sky is the result of mixing Copic black, a tiny bit of BV08, PB69 Prussian Blue Touch Twin, and WG7 Touch.

That pink on her cheeks came from RP291 Primary Magenta and F121 Fluorescent Coral Red Touch markers. And so on. If you’re good on color theory, go wild with mixing.

Near the end of the video, I am actually using the the refill color and dropping in the colorless blender ink, the same way you’d drop alcohol onto watercolor to make the colors move around and create circular splotches.

ShinHan Art really is incredibly helpful. I actually got myself a new set of liner pens, that I can’t wait to test out in my own artwork. So you’ll maybe see a review on those a bit later. Don’t get me wrong Copic quality is nice, and they’ve been around for awhile, but I like that ShinHan has the same quality at a much more affordable option. But, I do want to say that I think the Copic ink liners quality goes down after some years. Because I still am using some, but they started to smear with the Copic, and I wish I knew why because I use good quality Bristol or marker paper to draw on, and it still smears with marker. That’s not good! Just keep that in mind that some inks don’t have good shelf life. 😐

Anyways, this is a tribute to my old childhood. The lantern festival/Harvest Moon celebration or as Vietnamese call it Tet Chung Thu, is different than the Chinese counterpart that is for lovers. Ours is a celebration for children, and most families take their kids out in the night and light up these lanterns. I just remember seeing the really cool cellophane looking ones in the shape of butterflies, bunnies, and fish, but whenever the adults in my family got us lanterns, it wasn’t nearly as cute as the animals. They were just plain accordion lanterns, and I guess it just makes me question whether they were being frugal or we were just that damn poor. The little girl in the drawing is indeed wearing an ao dai, but I have found that there’s a lot of ao dai redesigned for older women, but there aren’t any cute contemporary ones for the kids. And I’m into gothic lolita, so if China, Korea, and Japan can do it! Vietnamese can too.

The setting itself is in Hoi An, it’s the lantern festival’s main place to be if you’re actually in Vietnam. That fish is actually on a bridge in the river in Hoi An. It’s near Da Nang city, which is less urban than the 2 other major cities of Vietnam.

In any case, I hope you guys enjoy my video, any feedback would be appreciated. I’m rather new to the world of video editing, but I’m finding it quite fun when things go right… hahaha

But I have a Twitch Channel, and I may be live streaming, so please be sure I will be posting up more video content in the near future.

Ack! My last blog post was last year in August. I guess its really because all I have been posting to is my Instagram, which lets me just upload… hahahaa

But clearly, I haven’t been paying very much attention to my blog. It gets harder to sift through my personal email about people linking to my page or commenting because I get so much fucking spam, its like, not even funny. I can’t see shit anymore. But thank goodness gmail knows to put my important contacts into the primary tab. I otherwise have been silly enough to sign up to a bunch of brands and have them send me a newsletter… just in case… >_> I never buy anything anymore though. It’s become very unmanageable outside of my primary tab because I have absolutely no time to delete every single email that is trying to sell me something. SIGH. Well, no worries, I’m switching my email address to my business address: tannie.art [at] gmail.com.

I also changed the name of this blog to tannieart.wordpress.com because well… greenmossway is frustrating and not my name whenever I want to comment on someone else’s blog. 😦 (actually, just realized I’ll need to get a name domain url…. and well, frankly, I kinda want to keep greenmossway. I’ve had it since February 2008. whatevs.)

Also, a quick shoutout to Seaweed and Kisses for linking to my Pen and Inks review post back in April. I didn’t see that until now. XD Yikes. But thank you! I tried to leave a comment, but blogspot and wordpress weren’t having an agreement…. In any case, she also has helpful links to the journal-hobby-crafts-person.

I guess I just really wanted to update on my business life. I think one thing that I should have done in the past year was write reviews on my past freelance gigs, such as the process that I went through with my clients and the end result. I always enjoy reading about those from other artists who are willing to do so.

Well, what have I been up to? Working on a side game project I’m not really allowed to post about until they publish it. hahahaa… Darn.

I also went to Anime Expo in July, dressed up as Hinata, a Poro, and an obscure female ninja (her name is Kaede! fyi) that nobody recognizes because they don’t know what Onimusha is!

Anime Expo – Attack on Titan by Chalk Twins! Amazing art!

Saw a lot of cool things at Comic Con this year as well, but I said I wouldn’t do portfolio reviews this year. And well, guess what? I did them anyway! But I got to meet a lot of cool people. If you saw a Death, it may have been me. 😛

In any case, me and 2 other gal pals have decided to create a shared blog which pretty much talks about what I should have technically been doing on this blog… haha We came up with the idea like a year ago or so, and let the blog sort of die, as some blogs seem to do because of negligent authors… -__- But! finally, there is a logo. And hopefully, more posts from each of us in the near future. 🙂

It only took me 3 months to follow up with these:

My initial thought was a play on the primary colors, since there were 3 of us, but I know I used rainbow… but the rainbow had to be a harmonious magenta, cyan ish, and yellow. We all agreed on ‘chroma’ for color, and tonik because it was cool and also that color, art, and the creative process could be something that heals the mind. Something along those lines. 😀 Also, playing on the idea of “tonic” for the bottle shape design, and also the old school labels.

After talking with them both, they felt comfortable with this logo. And now, our Line group no longer has an ugly/faceless image. Please be sure to check it out later when we have more cooler things to post, especially around October. 🙂

And I will definitely try to participate in this year’s inktober again… more prepared!

And once more, I have not updated my blog in awhile. I am still sorry to myself and subscribers, but in all fairness, I update my facebook page pretty regularly! I was flipping through a book of mine just now, and I have some input about color. Actually, I’m always still learning about art, and color all the time. Despite having graduated from art school, I’m still learning about color and value. It’s not that I didn’t learn the concepts and ideas, but there’s always something new that can be put into words or refreshers. And even then, I do not think that a course can teach us everything about one subject, though it is a start. With that, I’ll tell you that in my early life, I had no concept at all about color theory and I very much sucked at it. I can’t tell you how many times my siblings called me the 7 colored fish. I dressed with more than 2 colors and back in the late 90’s through mid 2000’s it was considered bad fashion… Quite frankly though, its fine to coordinate 7 colors, if done properly, I’ve seen an art teacher do this! I’ve always liked saturated colors — I think it is because I’ve spent a majority of my childhood with Seseme Street and kiddy shows. And of course, this is deliberate. Kids respond well to high intensity things. The reason why colors clash is because there is no harmony between the colors and they fight. Fighting is not compromise. No balance.

One way to harmonize colors is to “mute” them, which in terms of painting means putting in one color into the other. This may bring down the intensity of a color and turn it a little more greyer than before, but in effect, it harmonizes two seemingly clashing colors, like complimentary colors. There are usually many ways to do this, but always, it means adding one color into the other. I suppose it is like a relationship with a friend in a sense.

So Colorist by Shigenobu Kobayashi is a very technical and theoretical book on colors. I think graphic artists and Americans are more familiar with the The Color Index by Jim Krause.

It’s a very good book also on color, and is much more about CMYK and RGB and digital application/usage. This series spans to several other books.